A Year of Sabbaths (Week 29): Still Waters

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He makes me lie down in green pastures,

He leads me beside still (menuhot) waters...

(Psalm 23:2)

"It (menuhot) is that state in which there is no strife and no fighting, no fear and no distrust."

(Abraham Heschel, The Sabbath) 

We are a little over half-way in our family's year of intentional Sabbaths. We began with a conviction: when we stop, God starts.  (eg. Exodus 14:14, Psalm 46:10, Leviticus 25:1-7, Isaiah 40:31, Acts 1:4-5) God does big things to and through His people when they stop, wait, and be still. 

Though I am still convinced that this conviction is true, our episodic stopping has not led to a parting of the Red Sea and our picaresque pausing has not led to Pentecost.  Instead, God has led us to, and we have tasted, the still waters; the waters of "menuhot."   

Sometimes it is a long draught, sometimes it is just a sip on the fly...

After watching our three sons play three games of basketball between the hours of 9AM and 3PM, squeezing in breakfast and lunch and two trips to the gym, my wife collapsed on the couch and asked, "When does our Sabbath start?"

As a family, we have been trying to stop and take a break from the things we have to do and focus on fun; one whole day once a week. Sometimes we rest. Sometimes we play Monopoly or basketball.  Every time, God does something.  I have felt it. My wife needed to feel it on Saturday.  But it is hard to articulate.  Bible translators call it stillness, or quietness. Sabbath scholar Abraham Heschel describes it as the absence of strife and fighting and fear and distrust.  It is all of those things, of course, and more. It is a fullness and a contentment.  A sleepless rest.  A resounding quiet and a gentle strength. It is a tectonic upheval where the hours of our mundane life are thrown up and into eternity.  It is a time when life is truly lived.

No, the seas haven't split and the conflagfrant dawn has not morphed into tongues of fire, but in our fledgling efforts to experience Sabbath together, God has started to move in us.  We have a deeper appreciation of our blessings, a growing intimacy with one another, and a hunger for a closer walk with God...and frequent sips of menuhot. It's a good start.  We don't want to stop.  And who knows what will happen in the second half...

Church stopping. Less doing. More being.